


Epilogue: Taco Tuesday

by OldShrewsburyian



Series: Time's a strange fellow [6]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Fluffy Ending, I made them talk about their feelings, Light Angst, Tacos, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, there's angst in my fluff again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 14:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15821121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: By popular demand (you're all great): the Taco Tuesday epilogue, with extended resolution, emotional conversations, and plenty of guacamole.See what we have salvaged from all the ruins we have known.





	Epilogue: Taco Tuesday

Lucy texts the Time Team on the afternoon following his return, leaving campus: _Flynn’s back! Taco Tuesday?_ By the time she’s home, Rufus has responded enthusiastically, Jiya in a profusion of taco and confetti emoticons, and Jess with a wry assurance that they’ll be there, but one or all three of them may cry through the whole thing (Liberty Grace is teething.) She replies: _Yay! I’ll bring tissues._

Flynn, it turns out, has passed out on the couch, his book fallen to the floor. Lucy carefully restores it to the coffee table, tenderly flattening its pages, before waking him. Even semi-conscious, he reaches for her with flattering eagerness, and all she can think is how implausibly, impossibly lucky she is.

It is a little more than twenty-four hours later that she steps out over the abyss, and reflects that she was probably overdue for the gods to punish her hubris.

“So,” she says, “what exactly is more-or-less translation?” She is grading papers at the kitchen island; he is slicing vegetables with the kind of relaxed meticulousness she thought reserved for celebrity chefs.

He cocks an eyebrow at her. “No assassinations on the side, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Ha-ha.”

He shrugs slightly. “Just… the kind of translation where you carry a gun always, wear a blindfold sometimes. Translation for people who might have you taken hostage if you say the wrong word. Or the right one.” He actually chuckles. Lucy has stopped grading; she is vaguely conscious of holding her green pen in a death grip. “Or swiftly and anonymously killed; that’s probably more likely, actually.”

“They _what_?” It is only then that he stops what he is doing with the vegetables.

He furrows his brow slightly, looking at her. “Why did you think they wanted me, Lucy?”

“I — I — ” Her mouth is dry, and it seems curiously hard to swallow. “How can you be so calm about it?”

He half-laughs, and she can feel anger rising within her. Sometimes she thinks the ancients had a point, connecting emotions to fluids in the body. “How,” asks Garcia Flynn, “should I be anything else?”

She throws her pen down, then; it skitters across the stone of the island and drops with a sad little click onto the floor. “Because it should matter to you,” says Lucy. “It should — it should fucking matter to you, whether or not you have a future. Whether or not we have a future.” He draws his head back sharply. She avoids his gaze, staring resolutely past him at the basil on the windowsill. “You should care,” she says stubbornly.

“Lucy…”

“I know,” she says. “I know you love what we have.” Still she cannot bring herself to look at him, even hearing his stuttering breath. “But I don’t… it hurts that you can hold it so lightly, when I can’t.” She tells herself that she will not cry. “I can’t.”

“Lucy,” he says again.

“Yes?”

He sighs. “It is hard to imagine security.”

She takes a deep breath, gives herself time before replying. “But this is us,” says Lucy. She hates that her voice sounds small, fragile. “This is _us_.” Even if he can imagine security nowhere else, surely here… “And besides,” she says, “love isn’t about safety.” She manages, barely, not to stumble over the word. It seems to hang in the air between them. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him clench and unclench one hand at his side.

“For me,” says Garcia Flynn, “it might be.” She looks at him then, startled; his expression is still grave, remote. “I have,” he says, “always known cruelty. Kindness, too. My mother was always kind. But — ” he spreads his hands slightly. “I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head. He must know that he owes her no apology, not for that. She hops down from her chair. He does not move, but when she goes to him, he takes her in his arms. “ _I’m_ sorry,” she says into his shirt.

“Don’t be.” 

“Have I done anything, or…”

“No.”

Lucy wonders about all she does not know about this man, whom she so dangerously loves.

At last she says: “I… I need to know that you want this. That you really want this.” She is shaking; she has dropped her arms to her sides, and he still holds her. “That it’s not just an option, because we know each other and trust each other and — and all the rest of it.”

“An option?” He puts his hands on her shoulders, draws back to look at her. “Lucy, you have no idea how much…”

“Then you should try _telling_ me.”

Against all the odds — fleetingly, faintly — he smiles. “Yes.” 

She takes a deep breath, drops her gaze. Tentatively she reaches to tangle her fingers in the folds of the shirt at his waist. “You know that I love you, right?”

He laughs, and she can feel his trembling. “Yes. Yes, and that, _srećo_ , is absolutely terrifying.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“Pots,” says Flynn. “Kettles.”

“Garcia,” says Lucy, “can we _do_ this? I mean… are we capable of it?”

“You can do anything.” Hesitantly, he raises a hand to her hair, and she leans into his touch. “And I,” he says, and stops. She fights back the urge to cut short his silence. He presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I,” he says, “will make it my life’s work.” It is then that she begins to cry in earnest, and he draws her closer. “I am sorry, Lucy.” For answer, she clings to him. In the end, they decide to leave the vegetables for another night. They dine on fruit and cheese and chocolate and a bottle of wine; they take the glasses down from the bedroom in the morning.

***

She still feels as though she’s walking on a cliff’s edge, groping for guide ropes, afraid to plummet. Under the circumstances, she’s half-annoyed that he seems to realize this. She comes downstairs on Sunday morning to find an explanatory note — _At Mass_ — under her coffee mug. On Monday, she comes home from teaching to find something elaborate in a clay pot in the oven, and an unusually nice bottle of red wine uncorked to breathe on the table. Leaning up to kiss the taste of his cooking from his mouth, Lucy reflects that he really needs to get better at using actual words. But she’ll take what she can get, knowing it’s far, far more than she deserves.

She is certain that he can sense her nervousness about Taco Tuesday, and she has no idea what to do about it. She had allowed herself to half-plan, during that first euphoric day, how she and Garcia might break it to the rest of the Time Team that they were — in fact, at last, and entirely — together. She couldn’t think of any way of putting it that didn’t seem somehow infantilizing, trivial. She couldn’t think of any form of confession that wouldn’t result in some combination of exultation, smugness, and sulking from the others. (Well, maybe not sulking; but skepticism, at least.) She couldn’t imagine not wanting to boast of it: _see, see what we have done. See what we have salvaged from all the ruins we have known._ Now, however, it feels like tempting a malicious fate.

She doesn’t think they do anything conspicuously differently. As ever, he shadows her, a reflexively protective presence. 

“Hey!” Rufus clasps Flynn’s hand warmly. “Tell me you missed tacos.”

“Absolutely. Wyatt, it’s good to see you; you look terrible.” 

“I trust the two things aren’t connected,” returns Wyatt. “I understand first-hand why sleep deprivation is a form of torture.” 

“Well,” says Flynn,“the things we do for love.” Lucy picks up her menu and blinks hard at it. She tells herself that she will not, she will not cry.

“So,” says Jess conversationally, “what’s it like having your housemate back?”

Lucy counts the too-long beats of the silence. “It’s great,” she says, when she can speak. “I’ve eaten better meals in the last four days than I have in the last four months.” She glances over at him, to make sure that he knows all the ways in which she means it and all the ways she doesn’t. She finds him looking at her with such unguarded tenderness that she shivers a little.

“We should trade recipes,” says Jiya cheerfully.

“Mm,” agrees Flynn. “What do I need to exchange for the secret of your kebbeh pie?”

“It’s beyond price.”

“Ah, well.”

“Can’t blame the man for trying,” says Wyatt. “That stuff is really good.” 

It is shortly after the food arrives that Libby Grace sets up a wail. “Oh, god,” says Jess wearily. “It’s okay, sweetheart; it’s okay.”

“Let me,” says Flynn, and Jess looks up at him with tears standing in her eyes.

“Would you?”

“Sure.” He rests a hand very briefly on her shoulder. “Eat your tacos.”

“That guy,” says Rufus, when Flynn and Libby have left the table, “is the least likely-looking babysitter I have ever seen.”

Wyatt yawns capaciously. “Hey, don’t knock it. I am not looking a gift horse — ”

“Large baby-whispering assassin,” supplies Rufus helpfully.

“ — in the mouth.”

“He’s not an assassin,” says Lucy, half-absently. Flynn has gone out into the mild evening, and appears to be holding a one-sided conversation with the unhappy infant on his shoulder. There is a brief silence at the table. 

“Look,” says Jiya, “I know this is sort of a girls’ night question, but gender equality or whatever — do you have any idea how you look at him?”

Lucy jerks her attention back abruptly. “What?”

“Do you,” says Jiya, with wry amusement in her voice, “have any idea how you _look_ at him?”

“We should take a picture sometime,” says Rufus, heaping pico de gallo on a taco.

“I,” says Lucy, “um…”

“Hey,” says Jess, “hey, it’s okay. Do you want your tissues back? It’s just, since you said that you…”

“Love him,” finishes Lucy, taking the proffered pack of tissues.

“I’m sorry if…”

“No, no. You’re fine, Jiya. It’s just me.”

“Pining is overrated,” says Rufus, and Lucy laughs as she dabs her eyes.

“I know,” she says; “I know. It’s — actually — it’s all very new, but we, um…”

“Oh my god,” says Jiya. Wyatt swallows his beer the wrong way, gives her a thumbs-up while still spluttering.

“Yeah,” says Lucy, reaching for her own drink.

“So,” says Rufus, “naturally my impulse is to fist-bump you and offer to break every bone in his body in a brotherly manner, given the double impossibility that Flynn would hurt you and I would be able to break his pinkie, but… are congratulations in order?”

“Oh,” says Lucy, “sure.” Her eyes go back to the window. Libby is teething on the collar of Garcia’s leather jacket. She’s rarely seen him look happier. “It’s just hard loving someone who seems to care so little about himself.”

“Tell me about it,” says Jess promptly, and leans over to kiss her husband, to take the sting out of it. “Love you, babe.”

“I — ” says Wyatt.

“You’re doing much better,” says Jess comfortingly. “But I’m still up for starting a support group if you want, Lucy.”

“We all love you, you know,” says Jiya. “And we’re rooting for you guys.”

Lucy laughs. “That,” she says, “is moderately obvious.”

Flynn returns to the table, returns Libby to her mother. “I hope you saved some guacamole,” he says, and then blinks. “Did I miss anything?” Rufus becomes intensely interested in his remaining taco; Wyatt refills everyone’s drinks.

Lucy smiles at him. “Oh, nothing,” she says. She raises a hand to his collar and leans in, lips parted, to kiss him. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get tired of the expression of incredulous wonder on his face. 

“I see,” he manages, and reaches for the guacamole without further comment.

Jiya, grown shameless on romance and beer, leans conspiratorially across the table to Lucy. “How long,” she demands, “have you known that he blushes like that?”

Lucy reaches a napkin to Garcia, who appears to be trying not to choke. “Oh,” she says, grinning, “I’ve known _that_ for ages.”

“You have our blessing,” says Rufus solemnly, and Wyatt raises his glass. The six of them toast each other with mock formality, and all Lucy can think is how implausibly, impossibly lucky they are.


End file.
